Finishing touches

Planning plots for publication

Elizabeth King
Kevin Middleton

This week

  1. Planning plots for publication
  2. Font/point/line size
  3. Complex plot operations
  4. Reproducible visualization

Planning for public consumption

Manuscripts:

  • Don’t let the journal resize your figures
  • Determine the column and page dimensions of your intended journal
  • You might have to reformat figures for a different journal

Presentations:

  • Don’t present talks or posters with microtext.

Manuscripts

Print a page at 100% (no “fit-to-page”). Measure with a ruler.

Plan for figure dimensions

  • Single column: long figures / panels
  • Two column: wide figures / panels

How does your eye move around the figure?

  • Left to right
  • Top to bottom

Scaling

Everything in a figure needs to be readable

  • Text
  • Labels
  • Lines
  • Colors and gradients

Figure output

Use vector output (pdf, svg, eps, wmf [Windows]) for as long as possible.

  • ggsave()
    • width, height
  • cowplot::save_plot()
    • base_width, base_height
    • Works well with plot_grid()
    • Adjust figure aspect ratio